Is there such a thing as a ‘Porn Body’?
It may be a touchy subject, but we may begin to ask whether there is a kind of body particular to pornography. What is striking is the degree of mediation in these bodies, especially with plastic surgery. Not only is there is something mechanical and staged in pornography, but the figures have increasingly begun to look like dolls as well, with sculpted bodies or exaggerated features due to surgical augmentations.
While there is so much that is artificial about pornography, it seems that the artificiality has been ramped up to '11' with all the many ways bodies can be altered. While the sexual act is natural, pornography with all of its many stylisations changes this into a configuration that I like to call 'natrificial’. The natrificial is a body that is not only a body that you have but also one that you wear.
Let’s Begin with the Artist Orlan
It might be best to open this discussion in a left-of-field sort of way, with the French performance and installation artist, Orlan. Orlan is not a pornostar per se, but a lot to do with plastic surgery. In fact, she was the first artist to make plastic surgery the focus by staging a series of performance events. She underwent a series of procedures whose inspiration was from famous paintings of women. Today, she exists as a sort of living work of art, different from how living Barbies or Ken dolls claim themselves to be, though. She has her sculpted face adorned with two implants on the temples rising over the edges of her eyebrows.
Orlan is an award-winning artist whose work incorporates medicine, science, technology, and often her own body — she was the first artist to use surgery as an artistic medium. Via Orlan.eu
Barbara Rose makes a useful and unusual observation about Orlan:
Orlan’s medium, finally, is media. If that sounds redundant, she means it to be. Her critical method is based on a sophisticated feedback system, a vicious circle of echoing and self-generating images, spawning a progeny of hybrid media production. This continuous feedback looks difficult to escape long enough to gain sufficient distance to decode the meaning of her performances and their afterlife as documents, relics and replicated image banks.[i]
Although not intended to be read this way, her words can insightfully be applied to contemporary pornography, pornography in the age of the Internet.
And in this light, we can also safely say that Orlan’s work is highly pornographic. Here ‘pornography’ has to be taken in its less literal sense, to mean a feckless playing-up to salacious voyeurism, where there is no shame or inhibition. It is also a cheapening of things, their reduction ad absurdum, a displacement of intimacy by parading it in the public realm.
In doing so, Orlan confronted pornography with the pornographic, achieved through the spectacle of 'monstrous femininity'. As Kate Ince argues, this is precisely what is not permitted in 'the male imaginary' because it is not a viable prospect of the male gaze.
But in broadcasting the belly-churning ugliness leading to the pursuit of greater beauty, she was confronting 'the male imaginary with its own abjected content’.[ii] The gaze of anticipation and desire was also confronted with all the object of desire's repressed conditions.
The Internet and Pornography
Contemporary with Orlan’s performances was the growth of the Internet pornography industry, an industry that is now immeasurably large, although conservative lobby groups may have had a hand in the public hysteria caused by overinflated estimates.[iii]
This explosion (most figures of speech become a little sensitive and inconvenient when discussing matters such as these) had numerous effects, one of which was to make a particular default narrative sequence discernible. The other was to perpetuate certain expectations about the body.
There are many alternative kinds of pornography, but, as alternatives, these only serve to enforce the rule.
Through dint of sheer quantity, what becomes evident is that the convention for the porn body is that woman follow a roughly Barbie-like model and the man somewhere between Ken and bodybuilder.
But as the body culture accelerated in the 1980s, so did the pornography industry, and the two worlds were never too far away from one another. If one way for bodybuilders to earn a living was as a personal trainer, another was pornography.[iv]
Note also the interrelationship between a bodybuilder’s work and that of the pornography: one labours without any tangible result except that the commodity becomes himself, while the other performs an act whose biological trajectory is to reproduce the species, but where no reproduction takes place, and instead of the corporeal, carnal act becomes commodified.
Enter the ‘Natrificial’: the Manipulated and Worn Body
The sexual permissiveness of the 1960s, and the birth of pornographic brands such as Hustler (1974) and Playboy (1953), signalled a significant break with the pornography of the previous era. This was a new theatricality in which quasi-celebrities like John Holmes and later Anna Nicole Smith played a part.
Anna Nicole Smith and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Playmate of the Year Party in Beverly Hills. 1993. J. Berliner /BEI / Shutterstock
As pornography became increasingly stylised and the body types more fixed, the travesty and sham within the pornographic representation are there for all to see.
So the ‘natrificial’ enshrines two factors within straight porn over the Internet: the first is its rejection of naturalness—as opposed to, say, the appearance of naturalness of the filmic love scene—and second, the looks and body types it prefers. There is a discernible ‘porn body’ that is as much worn as possessed.
This is the paradox of artificiality: it announces its contrivance as a given; the pornographic image recognises itself always already as surrogate. Dress fetishes persist, but these exist together with a ‘porn body’.
In contrast to the 'actress' who may or may not have had the attributes the gazer is looking for, the porn body imposes itself onto the viewer to achieve what the viewer cannot without the experience and assistance of the pornographic representation.
It is also one of the ironies within historical symmetries that the first saline breast implant was introduced in France in 1964, while the silicone prosthetic breast was invented in America in 1961, which is only just before the beginning of the new genre of porn star.
Another significant stage in the manipulated body image is at the end of the 1980s, which witnessed a highly sexualised and busty feminine ideal, around the bra's centenary, 1989.[v] A little after arrives the fashion for washboard stomachs (‘six packs’) and bulging pectorals, disseminated by the likes of Calvin Klein and their highly successful black and white underwear advertisements.
Mark Wahlberg Calvin Klein Campaign. 1992. Via Instyle.com
Another key aspect of artificiality is it is not just played out on the surface but also in how the body moves. The body is, therefore, not only the site of technology (work) but performs technologically.
Note the awkward poses in straight porn to reveal all for the camera. For example, when the man is lying down but behind and the woman, also lying down, raises her leg to reveal the act of penetration— this is the body as marionette.
Further, the woman is more often than not wearing a garment that has been lowered at the top and hiked at the bottom. Thus, to dress up as the porn actor is to anticipate the state of semi-undress. The intimate is made specular, and the body mimics, or becomes, the clown of technology, delimiting coupling and love to a genital act.
The artificiality of straight porn is a condition that in ‘natural’, non-pornographic sexual relations is always repressed, namely that we clothe the other with our needs, desires, and expectations. Natrificiality is the space of fantasy, desire, and lack exaggeratedly grafted on the body. Tattoos, body modification, cosmetic surgery, athletic work, makeup, shoes, and other fetishes become one.
The paradox of the ‘worn body’ of porn is that it is at an extreme pole to classical nude, but much in the manner of the political horseshoe. The classical nude is uninhibited and in its beauty suggests harmony between culture/humanity and nature. At the same time, pornographic nakedness presents a kind of orchestrated violence that is not natural but preferably all about artificiality and exaggeration, celebrated through the ritualised repetition of the conventionalised professional straight porn sequence. This repetition engenders a rhetorical naturalness that rivals and undermines, the 'natural' sexual act.[vi]
The overwhelming quantity, together with the repetitive presence of certain conventions in bodies and activities has percolated down into fashion culture, with the now mainstream currency of terms like 'pornification.'[vii], ‘pornochic’,[viii] and ‘pornostyle.'[ix].
These designations are to the interrelation of body and dress, but more recently similar categorisations have devolved to the body alone.
Postscript: the Spornosexual
In March 2015, the German national newspaper Die Welt announced a new type of man, categorised by his resemblance to the pornographic model, thus confirming the latter as a somewhat autonomous and universally recognisable type. He is the 'spornosexual', a hybrid of the athlete and the porn star.[x]
Shutterstock
He is the successor of the metrosexual, or rather the ‘updated’ model.[xi] The spornosexual is like an athlete like David Beckham but with more pronounced bulges—one of the posterboy pundits of this new genus is the Munich-based designer Philipp Plein who uses models with minimal fat, a narrow waist, pronounced pectorals and shoulders, with shortly cropped hair and an expressionless face, reminiscent of G.I. Joe, but more angular (Plein sports a similar build, although he himself does smile from time to time). It is also not uncommon for such models, like Plein himself, to have tattoos.
Unsurprisingly this look has little to do with real, outdoor, participatory sport, but ‘the combination of sport and porn is rather obvious, since in both cases it is about function and aesthetics’.[xii]
References:
[i] Barbara Rose, ‘Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act’, Art in America, 81.2, February 1993, 125.
[ii] Ince, Orlan, 71.
[iii] Estimates vary, as the number is shrinking and expanding daily. Susanna Paasonen contends that the number has been diminishing since the 1990s, and ‘of the approximately 100 million sites currently available, an estimated 1.5 to 5 percent are pornographic—although some sources, including ones associated with filtering software and conservative Christian groups in the US, offer numbers as high as 12 percent or 260 million pages. Since such inflated figures, are enthusiastically circulated and presented as statistical facts, they are also referenced as objective findings in overviews of online pornography.’ ‘Porn Futures’ in Susanna Paasonen et al. eds., Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2007, 167.
[iv] See also Fussell, Muscle, 140.
[v] Marianne Thesander, The Feminine Ideal (1994), trans. Nicholas Hills, London: Reaktion, 1997, 218.
[vi] See also my ‘Straight Internet Porn and the Natrificial: Body and Dress’, 169-188.
[vii] See Susanna Paasonen et al eds., Pornification.
[viii] Annette Lynch, Porn Chic. Exploring the Contours of Raunch Eroticism, Berg, London, 2012. See also Adam Geczy and Vicki Karamainas, Chapter 5: ‘Music Video, Pornochic and Retro-Elegance’ in Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film, New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015.
[ix] Pamela Church Gibson, ‘Pornostyle: Sexualized Dress and the Fracturing of Feminism’, in, Fashion Theory, The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, Special Issue, Fashion and Porn, Pamela Church Gibson and Vicki Karaminas eds., 18.2, 189-202.
[x] Adriano Sack, ‘Was Will der spornosexualle Mann?’, Die Welt, 2 March, 2015, http://www.welt.de/icon/article129588106/Was-will-der-spornosexuelle-Mann.html
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
